It ain’t exactly Shakespeare, but there sure has been a lot of ink spilled in Manitoba about toilets recently. The provincial government offered a $50 rebate to new toilet buyers, but the cash came with a catch: you had to buy a dual-flush toilet, and you had to buy it on a specific day.
The one-day stipulation was a genius marketing move (it followed a marketing nightmare: originally, the toilets had to be bought from only certain big-box retailers, shutting out every small hardware store in the province, to a cacophony of howls).
Now, with thousands of shiny new porcelain water-saving thrones underneath ‘Toban tushies, there’s still more ink being spilled about where the old ones are going. Answer: recycled! Every story written has had the same self-congratulatory sheen: “Boy, we Manitobans are going to be doing a great thing for the environment, and even though we live in a water-rich province, we’re conservationists to the core!”
But wait: we could do more.
I read with interest about the concept of a NoMix toilet. NoMix, technically, is a brand from Sweden, but the concept is similar across brands: instead of a dual-flush system, it’s a dual collection system.
That is, there’s a place to pee and a place for No. 2. Separate collection points in the bowl make it look like a slightly smaller toilet bowl coupled with a tiny backwards-facing urinal shoehorned into the front.
They say that it means men have to pee sitting down, which is kind of a non-starter for me (and for others — from the New York Times article: “Professor Jenssen was flummoxed by one participant at a training workshop in Cuba who said firmly, ‘If a man sits, he is homosexual.’”).
Judging by the pictures I’ve seen, though, and by my own (perhaps inflated) sense of aiming ability, I don’t think it’s necessarily necessary for boys to sit. Take a look:
This NoMix toilet looks like a man could aim right into the urinal portion without too much trouble. Unfortunately, this particular model has a weight-activated valve, so you still have to sit. A problem that doesn't have to be a problem, methinks. Photo by Flickr user kikuyumoja.
On the other hand, I’ve long dreamed about having a bathroom with a real urinal in it, and I know there are others like me out there. In fact, I’d suspect there is a market for a toilet that is also half-urinal, if that’s how it was marketed — not as “the sit-down toilet for guys.” (Or this, ha ha)
Outdoor porta-potties often have side-mounted urinals that feed down into the tank alongside the sit-down seat, and if they can fit into those tiny spaces, I’m sure engineers could design a toilet/urinal that would fit into current home bathrooms. Perhaps a urinal that is mounted along the side of the tank?
Why is this important? Because it’s not just conserving water that is environmentally friendly — sewage is a major problem, too. Wastewater treatment is a gigantic energy hog, and dumping it into lakes, rivers and oceans leads to
Human waste was, for thousands of years, an important fertilizer, and even after sewage treatment, it remains potent enough to upset the natural balance of water we dump it into. That causes things like algae blooms and ocean “dead zones.”
Separating solid waste from liquid waste makes it easier to treat — and possibly to collect and use as fertilizer again.
Of course, in cities with existing sewer systems, building a brand-new dual collection network seems cost-prohibitive. That’s why the “urine diversion” toilet is being adopted more in places that the Times calls “fast-industrializing countries like China and India, which have money to invest in alternatives but few sewers.”
What’s interesting to me, though, is that this kind of toilet could be fairly easily incorporated in houses that use a septic tank, which are fairly common in rural areas. Hey, rural areas — isnt’t that where they use a lot of fertilizer, too? And haven’t fertilizer prices skyrocketed lately?
Seems to me like there’s an innovative answer being flushed right down the toilet.
